Tag: Raymond Schwab

Settle in for some “fun with voices.” Ride lazily. Lean back. Smile a bit. Stretch arms and shoulders. Syncopate the body with easy rhythms. See no damage. See no evil at all. Trace a path similar to Schopenhauer’s in relation to Buddhism and the Upanishads. Familiarize oneself with Raymond Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance, a book about, as Edward Said remarked, “the reeducation of one continent by another.” Said’s Orientalism critiques Schwab’s work for intuiting as the motive for Europe’s late eighteenth and nineteenth century encounters with ancient Indian religious texts a desire to learn from the East, rather than, as Said would say, an urge for mastery over the East. Rather than being revived by eastern spirituality — as had been the hope of the Romantics — Europe instead turned on the latter, framing it as evidence of the East’s “backwardness” and “barbarism.” From this emerges a reading of the blue flowers that appear at the end of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, since blue flowers serve as symbols of equal importance in works by several German Romantics. In his fable Heinrich von Ofterdingen, for instance, Novalis drew on ancient Indian texts like the Shakuntala to posit a blue flower as “at once a symbol of mythic immanence, sleep and mystery, organic flowering and growth, and total reconciliation of all dualities” (Feldman and Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology, p. 350). Art thou caught in a narrative? The end of another phase? How does one who is lost become saved? One way to move forward, perhaps, is by reminding oneself (as Huxley reminds us in his final book Island), “It isn’t anything to worry about. It’s all over and done with.” Breathe and start again.